Do they know it's Christmas time at all...

I know that most of my blog updates make little mention of some of the more ‘real’ aspects of life here. The situations that come at you like a kick in the stomach and make you realise just how lucky you are. And it’s not that I don’t encounter these situations frequently. It’s more that I try not to dwell on them, or not on my blog anyway. But this is going to be an exception.

On Friday I went to an orphanage in Abuja with a group of teachers from a school here, who have been visiting the orphanage for a couple of years now. And boy oh boy. The staff do their best - the children are clean and they don’t go hungry. There are about 30 children, most of them under the age of 3, and they all sleep in one room. And from what I could gather, they also spend pretty much all day, every day, in that room – apart from a few of the older ones who are able to open the door and go outside themselves. But for the younger ones, the staff can’t cope with taking them outside – one or two toddlers is enough of a handful, but 20 of them? Not easy. I even wonder how much time the smaller ones get to spend out of their beds. There were several very young babies. I picked up a baby when I got there because she was screaming, and I couldn’t put her down until I left because she just wouldn’t stop crying. I don’t think she was very well; she had a really chesty cough and seemed very hot, but unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be easily accessible medical care for the children there. And as they also haven’t had immunisations, and all sleep together in one very hot room, my guess is they get sick pretty frequently.

But if there was to be one positive, it would be that you can see how much the children love having the teachers going there each week. They were telling me that when they first started going it was really difficult to get the children to play with each other, because as soon as they were given a toy they would just want to run off with it and keep it for themselves, but now they do play with one another, and have learnt how to cooperate with each other (most of the time!). And some of the older ones were so desperate to learn, there were some foam letters, and one little girl just wanted me to teach her the alphabet the entire time I was there.

You could also see how much the community tries to help out, as just in the few hours we were there, about 5 or 6 people came through the gate to bring food for the children. Unfortunately what they need more than anything (apart from medical care) are people to go in there and just spend time with the children. So I’m going to go back each week. I don’t know how much good it will do, but it will at least mean that for an extra few hours there’s someone there playing with them and talking to them and just giving them some attention, which they are all so desperately lacking.

(And don’t worry mum, Squirt is proving enough of a challenge as it is. I appreciate that I can’t bring 30 children home with me)

Broken laptops, carnivals and two suitcases of cat food

It’s been a busy few weeks. I had a lovely two weeks at home. Lots of eating was done, and I returned to Nigeria with about 20kg of cat food for my little monkey who had grown considerably in my absence. I had a slight disaster in my first week back in that some water got spilt on my laptop at work and it immediately stopped working. It’s worth mentioning that I’m a fool who brought an Apple Mac to Nigeria with me. No one here uses macs, so trying to get it fixed was an absolute mission. I was helping to run some monitoring and evaluation training for VSO partners last week, and all of my presentations for this training were only saved on my laptop (this would be the one week when I hadn’t backed up my work). I tried leaving it to dry for 24 hours. No luck. I went to the Apple Shop in Abuja, also no luck. After sitting waiting for two hours I was told that their technician was in India until January. They gave me the address of a man I was told to go and see in a shopping complex here. This address consisted of 2 letters and 2 numbers. I got to the shopping complex, and spent the next hour trying to find the place. The complex was huge, with a rabbit warren of tiny little shops up numerous dark and creepy staircases. Most of the shops didn’t have names and only had the 4 digits above the doors, only they obviously weren’t in alphabetical or numerical order because that would have been far too easy. After eventually finding it, I realised the shop was locked up. I called the guy and was told he was “coming”. It was very very hot, and so I went to sit in the clothing shop next door where the woman was doing her very best to fall asleep, but was then disturbed by the irritating white woman who insisted on sitting there and talking to her for the next hour whilst waiting for the man to show up. By the time he arrived I was fast losing patience as I had spent the best part of the day sitting and waiting. He seemed to think he could fix it though (for an extortionate amount of money) and so I left it with him, after getting him to confirm about 10 times that if it wasn’t fixed I wouldn’t have to pay him any money. So the next day I went back to get it, and it worked! I was very excited. I won’t be able to afford food for the foreseeable future, but my laptop is at least working. Liquids will never be allowed near it again.

Jenny then arrived so it was great seeing her again, and then another VSO from Kaduna also came to stay for the weekend. We went to the Abuja Carnival, which helped to highlight once again one of the reasons why Nigeria does not have a booming tourism industry. We couldn’t find any information about the carnival route anywhere, and so after asking a friend we went to wait on one of the main roads in Abuja to see what happened. The carnival was meant to start at 7am. We got there at 12.30pm and were told it hadn’t yet started, but still couldn’t find out any information on the actual route the parade would follow. I have no idea what was happening on this particular day, normally I think I successfully give off a vibe of “please leave me alone” but this can’t have been the case on this Saturday, as I was targeted by people throughout the day. First of all we got accosted by a group of people who were representing a youth organisation, who wanted us to wear their t-shirts for the day and join in their parade. We managed to escape after being subjected to numerous video interviews and photos. We did get to keep the t-shirts though. We then went to sit back on the side of the road and wait. An old man came to sit down next to me. “Next to me” is a slight understatement; he was in distinct danger of sitting on my lap if he sat any closer. I couldn’t see what he was doing as I was sat with my back to him, but I could feel movements that made me feel distinctly uncomfortable, and so after some frantic communication via eye and head gestures, I got up and went to sit next to Jenny. Much to the amusement of everyone else, after about 10 seconds he then said he also needed to move because of “ants”, and once again came to sit pretty much on my lap. So off we walked again. Thankfully he then seemed to get the message.

Eventually the carnival started. Overall it was a really good day. The costumes were awesome, as were most of the floats (apart from one that looked scarily like it may ignite at any moment).

I did however feel immense pity for the people in the parade as it was very hot and they had to cover a distance of 18km. You could see some of them really wished they were anywhere else. I also lost count of how many photos I had to be in. At one point I was in very real danger of being dragged to be a part of the parade itself, but thankfully I managed to avoid that.

And now there’s less than two weeks left before the office closes for Christmas. And having brought back the best Christmas hat in the world from home (it sings AND dances) I am very excited about the prospect of my first sunny Christmas.